We want you to use the site.

You're the owner of the NHS and we want to know what you think about how your service is running and about any changes that we are considering. We want you to use this site to give us your opinions and join in the conversations. You should be aware though that posting material online means that you will be responsible for what you post. The following information is here to help you get the most from the site.

See the detailed terms and conditions for more about your responsibilities and the terms under which you can use the site.

Detailed Terms and Conditions

Detailed terms and conditions

There are more detailed terms and conditions governing your use of the site covering a number of topic such as copyright, warranties, privacy, conditions of use and more. Please review these as your acceptance of these terms is a condition of being allowed to use the site.

Terms and Conditions

Rules for participation

If you are using the site to voice your opinions and join the conversation, you will need to be aware of a number of rules in doing so. These are pretty much common sense and good manners and sticking to them is condition of use of the site. Use the link below to view the rules.

Rules for participation

Keeping yourself safe online.

Although we want to know what you think, we don't always need to know any personal details that might be used to identify you. When we do need these, it will be clearly signposted and you will have to give your explicit permission. We do our best to keep these details safe and secure and to make sure that they are only used by NHS or Scottish Government for reasons that you've agreed to.

It's important when you are using the site though that you take sensible steps to keep yourself safe online. You should keep your identity safe too by not posting details in public that would let other users of the system know too much about you. It's a good idea to use an alias when posting comments rather than your real name and you should never put phone, postal address or other personal contact details online in a public space. It's worth bearing in mind that other details might allow others to identify you too, such as images or videos that you might post or talking in too much detail about places that you go, details of friends, club memberships and so forth; you never know who might be reading your posts so it's a good idea to be careful online.

If you are under 16:
Please get a parent's or guardian's permission before participating.

Use of cookies and Privacy.

The site does not store any information that would on its own allow us to identify individual users of this service without their permission. Cookies are not shared with any third parties.

We don't use cookies to track your use of the site except where you've already logged on when they can be used to maintain data for the current session that you've logged into. They are only used to manage the essential working of the system, not for any more general tracking of your browsing behaviour across sites, nor to personally identify you. An exception to this is where you may have logged on to a specific part of the service - cookies might be used to manage your session and keep you logged on for the duration of that session. These cookies are only held for the duration of your log on session and would be re-created only when you log on again. A condition of use of the site is that you agree to us using these cookies.

Each access to the site does create a log entry that we may use to track pages viewed in aggregate but these are never used to identify an specific individuals or their behaviour. When you view a page on the site, your browser sends some information to us about you IP address, the kind of browser you are using and so forth.

Although in normal circumstances we never use any of the information logged as part of the normal operation of the service to identify any individual, we do reserve the right to do so where directed by courts or law enforment agencies or where we have reason to believe that criminal activity might be taking place.

User Anonymity and Personal Information on this site.

As noted above, log files are maintained and analysed of all requests for files on the SHOW servers. Aggregated analyses of these log files are used to monitor website usage. These analyses are made available to participating organisations to allow them to measure, for example, overall popularity of the site and typical user paths through the site - they are never used to identify individuals and their specific use of the site.

In combination with other information which is not collected by the site operators but which may be collected by suppliers of network services (your ISP), it may in certain situations be possible to identify an individual user's use of the website. We do not collect the additional information required and will make no attempt to track or identify individual users, except where explicit consent for this is given or where there is a reasonable suspicion that unauthorised access to systems is being attempted or where we are directed by law to do so. In the case of all users, we reserve the right to attempt to identify and track any individual who is reasonably suspected of trying to gain unauthorised and therefore illegal access to computer systems orresources operating as part of the service. As a condition of use of this site, all users must give permission for us to use access logs to attempt to track users who are reasonably suspected of gaining or attempting to gain unauthorised access.

All log file information collected is kept secure and no access to raw log files is given to any NHS external third party.

This site does operate an optional registration scheme which will give individuals certain access privileges. This registration can allow usage to be tracked. By registering with the system, you give permission for this tracking to be done where it is in connection with the operation of the site or for a specific purpose which relates to the specific discussions, forums or surveys which you have taken part in.

Accessiblity of this site

The National Health Service, and the development team are committed to making information available on the web to everyone in Scotland regardless of web browsers used or physical, sexual, social, ethnic or religious characteristics of users. We will deliver on this commitment by devoting the time and resources necessary to ensure that all users can access the services we deliver. We have validated site content against WCAG guidelines and were fully WCAG AA compliant when this was last done (01/2011, 05/2011). We understand that changes to the site may bring about issues between site reviews and also that compliance with standards may still leave aspects of the site with accessibility issues. We are committed to reviewing this site but also actively seek feedback on the accessibility of this site, which we will action.